When bitcoin first emerged banks didn’t want anything to do with it. But a few years down the line and pretty much all of them are looking at it.
Although no British High Street banks currently accept bitcoin — Barclays is tipped to become the first — many of them are experimenting to varying degrees with the record-keeping technology that underpins it, the blockchain.
Earlier this month 9 leading banks formed a partnership, headed by startup R3, to create a common “fabric” of blockchain for mainstream banking — essentially establishing the ground rules.
The blockchain software works like a distributed ledger, recording and enabling transactions. It essentially eliminates the need for a trusted middleman to sit in between an exchange, as the software itself acts as the trusted middleman.
